Street books are my favorite, though unfortunately not particularly cheap in Venezuela. Recent acquisitions include the following:

Ellner, S. The Political Parties and Their Dispute for Control of the Venezuelan Union Movement, 1936-1948 (1980). I know Steve tangentially, and had wanted to pick this book up.

Third World vs. Imperialism (1973), with contributions from Allende (see the date), Alvarado, Caldera, Echeverría, Touré, Nyerere, Mao, Thant, and Castro. Alvarez, F. et al.

Gramsci in Latin America: From Silence to Oblivion (1991). Lander, L.E., and Sonntag, H, eds.

Universalism and Development (1991), featuring essays by Arrighi, Sunkel, and others. This caught my eye because I was sure that “L.E. Lander” was Edgardo Lander—professor at the UCV, theorist of the coloniality of knowledge, and director of the last World Social Forum—not least because the picture looks a bit like him. But I’m not so sure now.

Moran, F. Revolution and Tradition in Black Africa (1971). A refreshingly theoretical discussion, spanning Négritude, nationalism, populism, totality, traditionalism, socialism, myth, and utopia.

Hanke, L. Studies about Fray Bartolome de las Casas and the Struggle for Justice During the Spanish Conquest of America (1968), a collection of essays originally published in English-language historical and theological journals.

The prize certainly goes to:

Acosta, L., Erhart, V., and Vega, P. Cultural Penetration of Imperialism in Latin America: Comics and Women’s Magazines (undated, but there’s an unrelated clipping from El Nacional dated 1978). An excellent piece of ideology critique, and nothing’s more fun than ideology critique.

Some excerpts:

“It’s necessary to demonstrate, with no place for doubt, ambiguity, or bad interpretation, that comics are but one more result of the official cultural policy of domination of Yankee imperialism.”

“But also, for this unpostponable contradiction the Yankees—that is, the comics—offer another answer: self-deception, self-betrayal, sublimation: Superman. The reactionary ideological key…Clark Kent is mass man, undifferentiated, common…The perfect model of the petit bourgeois assimilated to exploitation. For these cases, the answer is to dream.”

“Comics, as instruments of domination and stultification, aimed or tele-guided by Yankee imperialism and its front men should, must be unmasked, combated, eradicated.”

Then, there’s an entire essay on “The Indian, the Black, and the Latin American in North American Comics,” which includes the following:

“The blacks like watermelon and music. They are poor but happy…The indifference of their faces stands out, the lack of expression, the size of their mouths and the thickness of their lips. Both adults and children are the same: there’s no hope nor need for change.”

“The [Caribbean] men are complaisant and discreet. In the end they are likely impotent. And the women are easy and available. The native men evidently have no access to them”

The conclusion:

“The North American cartoon is almost always an instrument of subjection and colonization, presented as though it were a product of the imagination (“typically infantile”) it seems naïve, fresh, clean, unimportant but in reality…[it’s] propaganda, wisely administered.”

Not a street book, but I was also recently given the following:

El Troudi, H., and Monedero, J.C. Social Production Businesses: Instrument for 21st Century Socialism (2006). A crucial intervention, which I will write more about soon, and which deals with how it is possible to transition to socialism and beyond traditional models of collective and cooperative management schemes. The book was published by the International Miranda Center, a government-sponsored think tank dedicated to theorizing socialist development, and the authors have also penned Chávez’s recent (spectacular) speech at the United Nations. The book presentation was totally enlightening, explaining what they considered to be the history of the Bolivarian Revolution, its “populist” stage and the ideological dangers that confronted it (i.e. Luis Miquilena), and its recent radicalization after having neutralized these problems.